The Future Was Then

The mind is like a magnet: its obsessions form a pattern, intentionally or not. So it was when, at the Strand this weekend, I bought, for its title alone, “Le Cinéma Est Mort, Vive le Cinéma!” (The Cinema Is Dead, Long Live Cinema!), a 1967 book by Roger Boussinot, whose name was unfamiliar to me. He was born in 1921 and died in 2001; he was a critic, novelist, director, and producer, as well as a founder of the film magazine L’Ecran Français (The French Screen), for which such leading critics as André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc wrote (it’s where Astruc put forth, in 1948, his famous notion of the caméra-stylo, or camera-pen, anticipating the first-person cinema of the New Wave). And, it turns out, Roger Boussinot was a prophet.

His book is a rant against the domination of the cinema by its moneyed interests. It is also, more importantly, an assertion of the independent cinema that would soon come into being with the help of technology. He dreams of a “liberation” of the art of movies through a “banalization, so to speak, of the cinema’s means of production, through its becoming available to anyone and everyone.” And he says that this will happen by way of the television set, “which is to say, a screen.”

Essentially, it allows you to watch and rewatch movies from your personal cinematheque, just as your bedside lamp lets you read and reread books from your personal library. For this, all you need is a device called a “magnétoscope” [a VCR] which connects to your television… Wait just a few months [!] for the miniaturization of the magnétoscope, then its popularization, and the cinema will have undergone its most important change since 1895.

He explains that the change may well kill the film industry (as it then existed):

People will no longer buy tickets at the box office of movie theatres. That’s fine. Nothing to cry about. That’s how the cinematographic art will win its freedom of expression.

Because, for Boussinot, that will be the time “when anyone can make a film, as anyone can write a book, paint a picture, or develop photos, as anyone can record, publish, and release the song he wrote…” And he expects that this will happen by means of the “electronic camera,” which “will record directly—that is, electronically—onto the tape.”

And, most remarkably, he foresees that the technical and economic changes will also result in aesthetic ones:

Here, there’s something absolutely new that will emerge: …the character who evolves in front of the camera… is a raw reality that must be raised, as such, to a sort of abstraction, which is just what’s needed for it to attain a communicable truth: neither particular nor universal (this doesn’t exist), but relative. So, goodbye strict numbered shooting script, with the precise definition of shots, camera movements, placement of actors—that is, the cart before the horse. Between the cinema of theatrical convention and the cast-fishing of conventional journalism as practiced by Jean-Luc Godard, there’s a new form to discover in the realm of fiction.

In short, Boussinot saw trends in the independent cinema more than three decades ahead of time. He saw that the very nature of casual cinematic recording, apart from the studio-bound mechanisms of the commercial cinema, would bring about a new form of moviemaking, in which the material and practical situation of the filmmaker, including the discovery of his stories and characters, would be an essential part of the resulting film. And so it has happened. Boussinot died in 2001, like Moses in the desert, as his followers (which is to say, those who followed him unawares) reached the cinema that he had promised them.